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Thursday, December 24, 2015

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.

Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.

Americans smoke too much.

Americans do not exercise enough.

The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.

Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.

Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating health care costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.

Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.

Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high health care costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our health care costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above. Today we continue with this month’s update of Obama Care that we began yesterday, the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed.

1) The Daily Beast will never be mistaken for Fox News. It is a left leaning, Obama loving entity that really gets your attention when it criticizes anything related to the Obama administration. But that is exactly what it did in a December 2, 2015 article related to the problems with Obama Care. We have previously pointed out many of these problems and disasters but it is worth noting when someone like the Daily Beast finally acknowledges the obvious:

According to the Daily Beast article: “The President’s signature domestic policy, his namesake health care law, is doing very poorly.”

It mentions that the largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealth, has publicly stated that it might stop participating in Obama Care do to financial losses.

If companies like UnitedHealth start to leave the program the remaining insurers are likely to raise rates for their policies even quicker.

This possibility is made more likely since the insurers are worried they may not get Federal taxpayer bailout money to ease their financial pains.

According to the Daily Beast: “At root, the problem stems from the fact that it has turned out to be far more difficult to get young, healthy people to sign up for plans in the exchanges, and the population is therefore older and sicker than insurers had expected and the Obama administration had predicted.”

Wellmark of Iowa, the largest insurer in the state of Iowa, has reported that Obama Care policy holders use significantly more health and medical services for more chronic and critical diseases and illnesses than the company expected.

Not surprisingly, many Obama Care customers are “playing the system,” a strategy that Obama Care critics accurately predicted years ago. According to Wellmark: “There were 135 members [Wellmark Obama Care customers] who signed up for coverage, received several million dollars in health care services, and then terminated their coverage. Wellmark received only approximately 10 percent in premiums to cover those members’ health care claims.”

The Obama administration admitted in October that rather than attaining 20 million Obama Care customers by 2016 it will attain only about half that many, a massive 50% miss.

Again, we have covered many of these disasters previously. This review is important because it is from a corner of the media world that is almost always pro-Obama on everything.

2) An article by J.K. Wall from December 1, 2015 on the Affluent Advisor website pointed out how healthcare regulations and bureaucracies were out of control and driving up health industry costs. The premise of the article is that as the government imposes more and more regulations on the industry. more resources from the industry have to be devoted to fulfilling the requirements of the regulations:

From 1990 to 2012, while overall healthcare industry jobs grew by 75% only one out of every 20 of those new jobs was filled by a real doctor.

This left the country with a ratio of one real doctor for every 16 employees in the healthcare industry.

And even worse, only six of those 16 non-doctors are involved in providing actual health care, the rest are administrators and bureaucrats.

These numbers are made worse if you add in the lawyers, accountants, and industry consultants to the non-doctor totals.

And Obama Care with its thousands of pages of law and regulations and dozens of new taxes certainly added to this craziness where healthcare dollars are used to fulfill regulations rather than being used to heal Americans.

3) A recent article on the Political Outcast website by Joe Scudder on December 5, 2015 had an interesting take on how Obama Care might actually be causing Americans to eat more poorly, an exact opposite behavior that the law would want to create. Restaurants operate on very thin margins, the difference between being profitable and staying in business and unprofitable and going out of business is very narrow.

Thus, when a stupid law like Obama Care comes along and forces businesses to pay their employees more in the form of mandatory health care benefits or fine those businesses for not doing so, it places incredible hardships on restaurant businesses and their thin profit margins. Restaurants are trying to cope with this added financial burden in a number of ways including putting an Obama Care surcharge on on their menus and pricing, eliminating tipping while jacking up their prices, or just raising their prices in an attempt to cover the government mandated healthcare costs.

In whatever approach a particular restaurant takes, the bottom line to the customers of that restaurant is that they will be paying more to dine out at that establishment as a result of Obama Care. Combine this reality with the reality that many Americans have less disposable income because their Obama Care premiums and deductibles keep going up. Thus, we are likely to find that when American dine out in the future, they will likely be forced to choose less expensive and less healthy, i.e. fast food, options to fulfill their dining out experience.

And fast food is never a substitute for healthy food. Thus, it is highly likely that Obama Care has already had and will continue to have a detrimental effect on America’s eating habits, the exact opposite of what should be happening if we want Americans to be healthier, which would reduce healthcare costs.

4) As we often do in this series, let’s end today’s discussion with real life horror stories on how Obama Care has disrupted Americans' lives from across the country. The source of today’s heartbreak's comes from the website, www.ourhealthcarestories.com:

SUSAN, FLORIDA: Our policy last year went from 600.00 a month to 700.00 a month, then we just received a new letter a week ago saying that our policy is going from 700.00 a month to 1050.00 a month, plus raising our deductable from 10,000 to 12,000.00 a year. This start in Jan. We must repeal Obamacare.

LARRY, OHIO: I just retired, a few days ago received the letter from our insurance provider that Obamacare requirements have kicked in.

Current cost $ 636.00 month New cost $ 1057.00 month

Current deductible $ 7,000 New deductible $12,000

Current out of pocket $ 7,000 New out of pocket $ 12,350

Effective 8/1/14

This is my retirement gift from Obama & the democrats, an extra cost of $ 5050.00 per year for insurance coverage I don't want or need. I am very happy with my current coverage. There is no way this is Constitutional.

RENAY, WASHINGTON: Our insurance has DOUBLED! My husband is self employed and we have ALWAYS had insurance we bought on the open market, meaning we don't get it subsidized by an employer or government. We had a plan with a high deductible and low monthly cost because it worked perfectly for us. Of course, we didn't get to keep our insurance if we liked it (we were lied to by Obama) and our insurance didn't go down $2500. (we were lied to by Obama). Our insurance went from $500/month to $988/month. Our deductible went from $10,000. to $12,000. and with less coverage than we had before.

When Obama realized that he was caught in his lie and started handing out waivers to 'allow' us to keep our old insurance, I called our state insurance commissioner and said Obama said we could keep it. His office said they were not going to and just keep on as they were. I had looked at the exchanges and noticed that every insurance plan sold was almost EXACTLY the same in price. I also mentioned this to the insurance commissioner office that it didn't look like competition but more like price fixing and racketeering.

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